Tight Curves by Susan (submitted via email):

This happened to me, my son and then-husband over 35 years
ago, but I still remember and feel it, as if it were
yesterday.

The three of us were living in Tucson, Arizona at the time
and during the summer months made many trips up to Mount
Lemmon (also known as Summer Haven {in the summer} or Winter
Haven {in the winter}).

We drove up and down the 20-mile narrow, winding road, full
of switchbacks and no guardrails, so many times we were very
comfortable with it.

This one time, we were coming home around around midnight,
and about halfway down the mountain, all of a sudden noticed
headlights about 1/2 –3/4 of a mile in back of us.

Don’t know where they came from – as I said, we knew that
road like the back of our hands. How these car lights
suddenly appeared was a mystery as we had passed no areas
where a car could have come out of or come from.

I was driving this time, and when I noticed the lights, could
feel all the hairs on the back of my neck just stand up. I
asked my then-husband “When did that car get behind us?” He
turned around, looked, and said “Holy s**t, where did that
car come from?” So I knew it wasn’t only me. We kept watching
the lights slowly getting closer. I knew something bad was
going to happen if it caught up to us.

I kept driving, but couldn’t take my eyes off the road often
enough to keep track of the lights. Those switchbacks took
all of my attention.

BUT, suddenly, this feeling come over me
that if I could get to the last, real long, switchback, which
led to a one-mile stretch of straight road, we would be
safe.

The car was getting very close to us – one switchback behind
– I hit that last, long, switchback, drove around it, looked
in my rear view mirror and the headlights were gone.

Once we got to a place where we could pull off onto the
shoulder, we sat there for about a half-hour, looking back,
waiting to see if we could see any lights. We couldn’t. They
had disappeared. We kept watching the news for a week to see
if someone had driven off the road that night. No one had.

Didn’t know anybody well enough to relate this story to at
the time, but several years later mentioned the incident to a
friend who had lived in the area for years. He said this was
not the first time he had heard the story, but the first time
he had heard it first-hand. Until then, he had always taken
the stories with a grain of salt, thinking they had been made
up. Now he knew it was real. He believed us.

Once in a while I still dream about this incident – some
nightmares never go away.

One of the Nice Ones by plightofthevalkyries
(submitted via email):

My junior year of college, I was going through a pretty sever
depressive episode. I’d just returned from study abroad, and
I had pretty awful issues come up while I was out that still
shake me (more issues with the living than the dead).

I came back to campus and was living in the campus Women’s
Center. At risk of doxing myself, I attended a small,
secluded liberal arts college in the south with more than
it’s fair share of ghost stories, many of which took place
around the Women’s Center. I was always a solid skeptic, but
it’s easy to see why this place would inspire stories, and
everyone seemed to believe that there was more than one
ghost.

One of my friends would regularly see an older woman, sitting
at the top of the staircase, doing her knitting. Another
would get goosebumps every time she wandered into the TV
room, but only through one entrance.

The house was three stories tall, filled with oddly shaped
rooms, winding staircases, and decor that was somewhere
between Victorian and your great aunt’s house that hasn’t
been redecorated since 1983. I was placed in a large room on
the second floor that was just down the hallway from a large
balcony.

As with most college students, I was (and still am)
particularly nap prone. However, something weird started
happening while I was there: I started to develop sleep
paralysis. It had never happened to me before, and I haven’t
had it since moving out. For those of you lucky bastards
who’ve never experienced sleepy paralysis, essentially, I
would take a nap, wake up, be able to see the room around me,
but not be able to move or scream for help. It was like the
sound got stuck in my throat and the harder I tried to yell,
the harder it was to breath. These were terrifying episodes,
and as the semester dragged on, I started to experience them
not just during naps, but any time I would sleep.

I kept looking for normal explanations for this, and of
course, I wondered if it was my depression. However, other
people noticed how weird the room was too. I guy I was
fooling around with would keep stopping and ask if I also
felt like we were being watched. The resident cat wouldn’t
cross the doorway to my room.

At the end of the year, we had grad week celebration. I
decided to take a nap right before one of my best friends
graduation parties. Of course, sleep paralysis strikes. As
I’d done every time prior, I tried everything I could do to
move, but this time, it worked. I jerked upright into a
sitting position. I still couldn’t walk, but I was able to
half crawl, half drag myself out of the room. I felt
compelled to drag myself out to the balcony, where I saw a
young man, maybe a little older than me sitting there. His
hair was slicked back, and his clothes looked like he was
getting ready to go to a fifties sock-hop party.

“Sit with me,” he said. I pulled myself up to the chair next
to him. He started talking. He said “I’ve seen you a lot
recently. I know you’ve been having a really hard time
lately, and I wanted to let you know, you can leave with me
now.” I don’t know why, by I felt completely comfortable with
him, but weary of going anywhere with him.

I told him, “I think I need to stay, but thank you.” The
moment I said that I snapped awake, back in my bed, fully
able to move.

I threw on a dress and ran to meet my friend for her party.
While I was there, I saw another person who lived at the
Women’s Center. We started talking and she noticed that I
looked a little shaken. Hesitantly, I told her what had
happened. As soon as I started to get to the man on the
balcony, her eyes got wide. She stopped me, and described, in
perfect detail down to the shoes, the man that I had seen.
She’d seen him too, always wearing the same thing, always in
perfect form. “He’s one of the nice ones.” I knew she was
talking about our ghosts.

I moved out of the house three days later, for end of term.
I’ve never had sleepy paralysis since. To this day, I am
completely confident that the man on the balcony offered me
death. I’m glad I stayed.

And now, as a special project from the Jezebel video team, we
bring you illustrated and narrated versions of two past stories
that we consider among the greatest of all time, Look at
Me by TheatreGuy and 911 Calling by Indiana Joan: